August 14 - August 18, 2019
Hey guyssss. I've been slacking, I'll say it. I came back from Europe about one month ago now, but am just now getting around to writing this blog post. It has basically been a little over a month or something (I didn't do the math right) since I was in London! My excuse and reasoning for being soooo late is the fact that my second month program professor decided to assign us 4 more assignments that were all due within the past two weeks even though the last day of class was three Thursdays ago. With that being said, I procrastinated because I could not physically get myself to do it, so there's that. But anywayssss...
On the Thursday of the second week of classes in August, there was a Spanish national holiday. The UO students in the University of Oviedo program got the day off, but my professor was originally not going to give it to us, but we convinced him otherwise 😁 My roommate Melissa and I decided to take advantage of the now four-day weekend to go to England! We rented an airbnb in East Croydon and flew from Oviedo to London on Wednesday night. We arrived at like 11pm and decided to try and take the tube to our airbnb but we effed up and ended up calling a taxi from whatever random station we ended up at. The airbnb was really adorable. It was a shared airbnb so we got a private bedroom but the hosts lived there too. They were a really sweet young couple.
The next day, we woke up really freakin early so we would have the whole day to do stuff. Our first stop was Piccadilly Circus. This became one of my favorite parts of London really quickly. There was so much going on everywhere, and a lot of street performers! We met up with one of Melissa's friends who lives in London. We walked around through Chinatown and then decided to stop at Nando's for lunch.
Above is the menu from Nando's, idk I thought it was cool. I was really convinced that was my first time having Nando's, but was later told by my mom that we used to go to the Nando's in Malaysia all the time when I was like 5. I don't remember it though, so I'm counting this as my first. It was pretty good not gonna lieee.
After lunch, we walked around Soho and Oxford Street, which is a HUGE shopping area. I of course had to stop by the Nike store. It was insane. Like actually insane. It was four stories. Yea, I said FOUR. and there was a DJ on the first and fourth floors. There was a whole little jersey printing shop inside, an area for Nike ID and a shit ton more.
We spent so long in the Nike store that we got done with shopping for the day. We went into a couple more places before deciding to head down near the London eye to get double decker bus tickets because we were tired of walking everywhere lol. On the tour, we got to see Trafalgar Square, really pretty buildings (which were basically everywhere), the London eye, River Thames and more. We ended the night at Buckingham Palace.
On Friday, we woke up early again. We bought tickets the night before for the London Eye, so we went and did that first. I had made a reservation at the Sanderson hotel for afternoon tea, so we went there afterwards. The afternoon tea at the Sanderson was Mad Hatter-themed. Everything looked really cute and the whole interior decor was really pretty. We also got to take a box of tea of our choice to go, which I was a fan of :)
After tea, we met up with Melissa's friend again. It was high key cold and raining which was great. We also didn't have an umbrella. We went to Westminster Abbey, St. James's Park, a couple cute neighborhoods and the Knightsbridge, before saying bye to Melissa's friend and heading to Chinatown, because Melissa and I naturally wanted boba 😁
After boba we were kind of near to Primark. We had gone in before tea, but didn't get to fully look, so we went back there. It was literally a massive store. It was four floors and had everything you could think of. It was basically like an Ikea but for clothes. I surprisingly only got like one thing and it was like $6 so SCORE. I couldn't really find stuff that I really loved though. After we were done with Primark we were starving because we hadn't eaten dinner yet. There was a McDonald's conveniently across the street from Primark so we ate there. I wanted to try the spicy chicken nuggets that were being advertised throughout the city. They were actually bomb. I didn't realize it was only a limited edition thing in the UK. We later managed to take the last train back to our airbnb, and I basically passed out. I was so tired!.
The next day was our last full day in London. We got off at St. Pancras station. The station was so pretty and HUGE. We went to a breakfast place my friend recommended called Half Cup. I got some Avocado toast thing and a chai and Melissa got their take on the classic English breakfast.
After breakfast, we headed to Notting Hill. I had been wanting to go, the whole trip so we finally made it out there. Notting Hill was so so cute and the Portobello Road Market there is the largest antiques market in the world apparentlyyy. We spent some solid time walking around and taking some pictures at cute houses. The whole neighborhood was so cute it felt more like a movie set than real life.
We were probably in Notting Hill for about two hours before we decided to take the double decker tour bus back towards the city. We had bought the double decker bus tour tickets the previous day with the London Eye tickets, and it came with a riverboat tour on the River Thames. It was the perfect thing to do on our last night.
After the tour, we made time to go to Harrod's because both my mom and my host mom Angeles, told us we needed to go! The store was insane and so overwhelming. IIt had every designer brand you could think of including a whole section dedicated to insanely expensive wine and cigars. We didn't stay there for too long because we were starting to get hungry. We were craving açaí bowls. The only place we could find that was still open was back in Piccadilly Circus but we weren't mad about it because we wanted to go back anyways. It took us SO so long to find the açaí bowl place because it was kind of hidden in Kingly Court near Carnaby Street. We had no idea about the Carnaby street area. it was so cute and aesthetics were off the chartsss lmao.
We explored the area for a bit. Most of the stores were closed because it was late, but luckily Hamiley's was still open. We had walked by it when we were going to the açaí bowl place earlier and wanted to go back to check it out. Hamley's is a massive toy store. It had 6 stories worth of toys! It was interesting to see all the toys that are popular now, that didn't exist when we were younger. We made sure to go to every floor. You could basically find every toy you could think of.
We realized that we hadn't really gotten souvenirs for our fams yet. I honestly just couldn't really find any that I liked enough or knew people would like, BUT we ended up finding some last minute things in the stores around Piccadilly Circus. I finished shopping before Melissa did, so I went outside and watched the street performers. We hadn't really been in London at nighttime so I'm glad I got to see it. Overall, I really really love London. It's such a diverse and beautiful place. There's also just so much to see and do always. I definitely wanna go back in the future and maybe even live there for awhile one day. :)
P.S.
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